The only three-letter acronym hotter than NFT this year could be API. On that note, Visa bought an NFT for $150,000 and Insight bought ~4% of API-platform Postman for $225,000,000.
The open-source private markets were wide open over the past two weeks with 3 100mm+ deals and ten deals totaling over $700mm. Across every stage, enterprise OSS companies continue to see a very strong investor appetite.
This week we sat down with Liyas Thomas, who founded Hoppscotch, an open source API development platform, as a side project from a small state in India (Kerala!) with a two-person team and turned it into a massive open-source success. He shares some unique insights on what resonated with the community and what drove the virality of the offering. Although early, Hoppscotch exemplifies the power of community and the ability to build transformational technology regardless of geography, team or experience.
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Private Markets
Postman, the preferred API platform for developers, announced their $225M Series D at $5.6 billion valuation led by Insight Partners.
Grafana Labs, building open and composable operational dashboards for visualizing data and improving monitoring, announced their $220M Series C led by Sequoia Capital and Coatue.
Apollo, creating a programmatic approach to labeling and managing the data at the heart of AI development, announced their $130M Series D at +$1.5B valuation led by Insight Partners.
Preset, announced their $35.9M Series B led by Redpoint Ventures.
Teleport, a leader in remote infrastructure access, announced their $30M Series B led by Kleiner Perkins.
Metabase, providing open-source tools that make it easy to interact with datasets, announced their $30M Series B led by Insight Partners.
Discourse, providing open forum hosting tools for civilized discussion, announces their $20M Series A led by Pace Capital.
bodo.ai, building an extreme performance parallel-compute platform for data pipelines, announced their $14M Series A led by Dell Technologies Capital.
Fig, adding VSCode-style autocomplete to your existing terminal, the preferred API platform for developers, announced their $2.2M Seed led by General Catalyst.
Webiny, creating a serverless application framework, announced their $3.5M Seed led by Microsoft's venture arm M12.
Public Markets
To track the performance of COSS companies, we’ve created an equal-weighted index comprised of public names including: Kaltura, Couchbase, Confluent, MongoDB, Elastic, Talend (acq. by Thoma Bravo announced), Cloudera (acq. by KKR/CD&R announced), Rapid7, Fastly and Jfrog.
The COSS Index continues to lag but has trended up over the past six weeks in conjunction with the broader markets.
COSS Index -3%
NASDAQ +17%
S&P 500 +20%
The COSS Index continues to flip flop the lead with the NASDAQ over the last month.
COSS Index +96%
NASDAQ +87%
S&P 500 +55%
COSS companies traded up over the last month continuing their winning streak over their Emerging Cloud peers. All three indices continue to trade significantly higher than their rolling five-year average.
COSS Index: Current Multiple 16.3x | Five-Year Mean: 8.4x
Emerging Cloud Index: Current Multiple 14.8x | Five-Year Mean: 9.6x
NASDAQ Composite: Current Multiple 4.5x | Five-Year Mean: 3.2x
Interview with Liyas Thomas, the Founder and CEO of Hoppscotch.
OSS:
What’s your background?
Liyas:
I've been in the tech industry for the past five years. I started my career as a software engineer, in a company called Buy Me A Coffee. Right after my graduation, I started working on this cool project called Hoppscotch. And it's almost been two years since I started working on it.
OSS:
What is Hoppscotch?
Liyas:
Hoppscotch started as a side project, which allows developers to generate API requests from the browser, but it has transformed to a whole level of API testing platform, API development, amongst other use cases. Hoppscotch is an ecosystem of all these smart tools which allow developers to build, test, deploy, document, and share, collaborate API's with their teams.
OSS:
How is Hoppscotch being used today?
Liyas:
Hoppscotch is mainly tailored for individual uses. But users have found it pretty useful and they start sharing it with their peers. And at the moment, Hoppscotch has been hosting mid-scale companies with not more than 100 employees. But also, we have teams, smaller teams from enterprise-level companies using Hoppscotch, internally.
OSS:
Hoppscotch has over 30,000 stars in 2 years. How did it become so popular?
Liyas:
So first of all, the success looks totally different at scale, like for an open source project, obviously, Hoppscotch is a really good example. We have seen a lot of adoption. We have seen a lot of people using it in their workplace. That's a great thing. But the intention of this project is the single reason why. This is the only logical explanation that I could come up because I have seen the actual users, they are literally sharing it with their peers, just because they found it useful in their workplace or in their daily life. So the space we are operating in, the API testing space, it's actually a messy space because there is no one to rule them all. Even though there are some alternatives, it takes a lot of effort from the engineering team to stitch all those tools and get an expected result.
Initially, when Hoppscotch started I made this proposition that it will be a truly open, transparent, flexible – all of the characteristics of an open source project. We made it pretty easy for everyone to try it out. We intentionally removed the landing page. We welcome users to the app without a login or sign up which allows them to use the app from the first five seconds onwards. So we intentionally removed all the gateways, all the clicks to use the app. And we made it so simple to use the app that users are likely to share with their peers. And that's the reason why this got this much popularity in such a short span.
OSS:
So it sounds like the primary drivers were the combination of utility and usability of the application?
Liyas:
That's the one-liner to this achievement. But I hope there may be some other extended side effects like users who are frustrated with their current apps found a new project. The single most important factors were the ease of use and obviously it solves a big problem that has existed for a long period of time in the tech industry.
OSS:
Where do you want to take Hoppscotch?
Liyas:
Hoppscotch is now an ecosystem with a lot of tools working under an umbrella. All of those smaller tools, act like a single body in a platform where you get team collaboration and shared collections. Hoppscotch gives you features that touch every lifecycle of an API development process.
Initially, we had built an API testing platform, which is the current web client, but in the near-future onwards, we will start focusing on later lifecycle in API documentation, API deployment, and generating documentation in real-time.
So first comes the documentation part, deploying the APIs and generating the documentation for users and doing that in real-time.
And next, we will be focusing on API testing. Testing comes with a lot of changes, like automated testing. So we will set up a marketplace for engineers or developers to write custom scripts, custom boards, custom apps that run along with API deployment. Once we have this testing and deployment complete, the roadmap consists of features or stages, where we'll be focusing on API design where engineers will have a facility that gives them the flexibility on how to produce the best designed APIs and how to document it better.
OSS:
What advice would you give open source founders in terms of creating a successful community-driven project?
Liyas:
This is one of the questions that has been asked a lot of times, but every answer basically boils down to this set of answers, which basically includes having good written documentation helps, talking with your community helps, interacting with your community helps. But I think that the root mindset of open source contributors or open source maintainers should be this willingness to help people, but it shouldn't have to include coding at all. You can find lots of ways to contribute to a project. It may include building a product, building a software product, documenting your favorite project, or translating your favorite project. The open source as a whole comes with a lot of features and ways to make a contribution.
So I believe to make any project successful it’s important to have the capabilities for the users to make contributions with minimal efforts. For example, if you want to make your open source project look great, you should accept contributions from developers who are good with translations, who are good with front-end engineering, who are good with design, etc. The willingness to help people and making it easier for others to contribute, others to share your project is the single best reason. It's the thing that you have to keep in mind to make your open source project great.